Success has made Atlantis decadent, cruel, and greedy. It has begun to rot from within, its people growing hungry and desperate even as its rulers extend their imperial power ever-farther into the world.
Into this time of conquest and suffering comes Tar Yunkai—a peasant sold into slavery as a boy, grown to manhood in the fighting-pits of Atlantis, and determined to seek freedom and revenge against the empire that tried to destroy him.
Tar sees the hollowness at the heart of Atlantis and believes he can sink it to the bottom of the sea. He doesn’t believe in destiny—yet Tar will not sink Atlantis. He will be the one who saves the empire from itself.
Success has made Atlantis decadent, cruel, and greedy. It has begun to rot from within, its people growing hungry and desperate even as its rulers extend their imperial power ever-farther into the world.
Into this time of conquest and suffering comes Tar Yunkai—a peasant sold into slavery as a boy, grown to manhood in the fighting-pits of Atlantis, and determined to seek freedom and revenge against the empire that tried to destroy him.
Tar sees the hollowness at the heart of Atlantis and believes he can sink it to the bottom of the sea. He doesn’t believe in destiny—yet Tar will not sink Atlantis. He will be the one who saves the empire from itself.
Ancient races ruled the land. They had no interest in the sea. Mankind was still young, and built its empires along the disregarded coasts. With the sea safely at their backs, the defenses of men faced inland, toward the enemies they most feared.
But man’s greatest enemy has always been man.
Although he lived near the mouth of the Kohe’Tu river, Tar of Yunkai had never seen a ship. There were two reasons for this. First, the waters at the river’s mouth were studded with submerged rocks that gutted any hull larger than a fishing-boat. Second, the Yunkai were said to be demons. Some claimed they were born with fur and fangs. Others said they changed into wolves at night.
Tar had lived thirteen summers when the slave-hunters raided his village.
Three ships came from the south. Their captain, Scimi the Black, knew nothing about the region except that it was seldom harvested for men, and would be unprepared for an attack. Atlantis had an endless need for slaves. Because of this, long stretches of southern coast had been stripped of their populations. Only in hard-to-reach places could human prey still be found—such as the Kohe’Tu river.
Scimi stroked the fierce black beard that gave him his name. He was legendary for his skill at navigating dangerous waters. He could read currents like a map.
He guided his three long, low ships through the shoals of submerged rocks by watching the pattern of the swirling water. His pathfinding was impeccable. He steered his fleet up the river, and soon saw the reed-walled Yunkai huts along the high ground.
The ships came hissing through the river current and drove their prows upon the white beach. Their figureheads arched like snakes about to strike. Before the oars were up, forty men sprang from the decks and charged the quiet village.
The slavers were pirates by trade. They carried torches, cutlasses, and three-pointed spears. As they rushed toward the huts, naked brown folk ducked inside, or fled into the forest that fringed the waterfront.
This much was typical in such raids—the ships had raided another village the previous day, and its unfortunate inhabitants fled or hid just the same. But what happened next had never occurred before.
The pirates were halfway to the first hut when they were met with overwhelming force. Straight through their thatched walls leapt the villagers. Armed with well-kept steel, they fell on the invaders like tigers.
Roars of pirate bloodlust turned to screams of terror. Limbs flew spurting from their joints and guts were tangled in the sand. Within the first minute, a dozen of the pirates were dead. Yunkai men and women fought side by side, slashing the enemy with abandon. Their children would pop out of hiding places to slay the mortally wounded with flint knives, then conceal themselves again.
Although Tar’s tribe lived by fishing, its heritage was war. The ancestral steel with which the villagers fought had been quenched a thousand times in blood. The first of his people had come from across the Eastern Sea, hewing their way through a hundred nations, and settled in this place only because their numbers were too few to continue on, and their enemies too numerous to go back. A hundred years and more they had lived there, tending their fighting traditions like a sacred flame.
Scimi had heard vague tales of such a tribe, but didn’t believe them. Now he did. He had never seen common people so eager to fight.
The crews of the first two ships were massacred among the huts. Bloodied survivors fled to the third ship. Some made it aboard, but not all. Fearing a counter-attack, the intact crew thrust their vessel back into the waves.
The pirates wanted easy kills and ready plunder. They were only courageous when victory was certain. Opposed, they fled to raid another day. Scimi was no different. He bellowed the commands that set the oars to flee. He saw the men he’d abandoned fall to the crimson blades of the Yunkai. The river was stained red.
The Yunkai were not done. From the treeline swarmed arrows. They were drilled with holes to make them scream as they came down, studding the naked backs of oar-slaves and pirates alike. Half of Scimi’s crew were clawing at the barbs that pierced their bodies before the ship was out of range. Scimi could hear the villagers laughing as they loosed their bows—it was sport for them.
Only one of the raiders had caught himself a prize.
A boy, twelve or thirteen years of age, was slung over his shoulder. He hadn’t captured the child for a slave, but used him as a living shield to escape the village.
Scimi ordered the snake-headed prow of his remaining ship turned to the open horizon. The sails filled and what oars remained tore at the water.
“What devils were those?” Scimi demanded of the gods. “I have sailed every coast south of here, and never encountered such fighting savages!”
“I’d heard tales, but thought them nonsense dreamed up by cowards,” said First Mate Skraj. “I feared the pithecines more, until today. Are they demons?”
Skraj’s bald scalp was split to the bone by a sword-cut, so that his skull peeped through like the white of an eye; the man didn’t yet know the extremity of his wound, or he would have collapsed upon the deck.
“I captured one,” said the sailor who had taken Tar. “If it’s a demon, it’s disguised as a boy.”
Scimi ordered the child brought up to the foredeck that he might see what make of men they had encountered. He expected the child to have claws, at the very least.
The boy was unconscious. Scimi understood why he had not resisted capture like the rest of his kind—he’d been stabbed half a dozen times. The boy was muscular for his age, hard of limb, brown-skinned, with eyes the color of ripe grain. His black hair was tawny from the sun.
“Bind his wounds, and if he lives, I’ll learn what sort of creature he is,” Scimi said. “If we could capture a score of those people they would gain great fame in the arenas of Thohar, Kita, Magon, and even Atlantis herself, and their price would make us rich.”
Harper-Jones starts this retelling of Royce E. Gibbons' Victorian Era translation of Epos of Atlantis with an explanation. She forewarns any fans of the classical tale that this will be different to his muted transcript; she will not leave out the bawdy details, the sex and morally grey subjections of her hero. But even with this warning, I still wasn't quite prepared for what followed. Although Harper-Jones claims that Slave of Atlantis is a relatively true retelling of Gibbons' original translation (although with more modern interpretations and language), it's impossible to say if this is the case. I struggled to find any references to Royce Gibbons online, despite conducting several searches using different word combinations. So, I'll just have to take Harper-Jones' announcement at face value.
So, with Slave of Atlantis, we're thrown immediately into a world of brutality. Tar is a young teen living with his tribe at the mouth of a river, when they're attacked by pirates. The tribe are warriors at nature, but Tar is still taken by surprise and captured into slavery, and will shape his life for the rest of the story. He's abused, forced into fighting pits, has a lot of sex, is forced into manual labour in a chain gang and must survive a night in a mad-mans deadly garden.
There's some very, very graphic scenes in Slave of Atlantis as we follow Tar on his hell-bent revenge quest and determination to stay alive. It's a grim tale, of the sheer brutality of the human race, and how we can be our own most dangerous enemies. But there are also some points of humour, especially in the second part of the book when Tar meets a wonderfully foul-mouthed pirate woman with whom he must make a fragile alliance if he hopes to survive to the next morning.
While the first part of the book is more or less Tar's biography (in essence), the second part of the book strongly reminded me of a sped up Hunger Games. He must survive a night in a deadly garden upon Atlantis' man made surface, dodging attacks from other captured slaves. Only one person may win this contest in an arena filled with deadly creatures and even deadlier traps. That's where he meets Krait, the aforementioned foul-mouthed pirate woman. Krait brings a much needed spate of quick one-liners and quick wittedness that had been missing from the first part.
In all? If you enjoy reading books with graphic sexual content, explicit language and gory fighting, all set on the much fantasised continent of Atlantis, then this is the book for you. For what it's worth, I enjoyed it.
S. A.